


Starlight

by Orockthro



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Developing Relationship, Heist, M/M, Napoleon Solo POV, Post-Movie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-16
Updated: 2018-12-16
Packaged: 2019-09-20 11:34:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17021913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Orockthro/pseuds/Orockthro
Summary: Illya grabbed Napoleon by the lapels, threw him against the hard bench of the truck’s backseat, and pushed his mouth against his with a hot, desperate need.“So I take it we’re not going to talk about this then?”(Or, Illya and Solo steal a million dollars, break up, and get together. Not in that order. Gaby helps.)





	Starlight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sweety_Mutant](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sweety_Mutant/gifts).



> For Sweety_Mutant. :) I hope you enjoy!

“Do not touch me.”

Illya violently shoves Napoleon’s hand off his arm. It’s a hundred degrees, nearly pitch dark with the night stars half-blanketed and hidden away by the Los Angeles smog, and the long black sleeve of Peril’s shirt is damp with sweat. For the brief moment of contact, Napoleon savors the solid, warm strength of the man who had, ten minutes before, kissed him just as violently in the back seat of truck they’d stolen.

Kissed is a term that’s perhaps too romantic, too gentle.

Illya had grabbed Napoleon by the lapels, thrown him against the hard bench of the truck’s backseat, and pushed his mouth against his with a hot, desperate need.

It had been an eventful evening.

“So I take it we’re not going to talk about this then?”

“There is nothing to talk about.”

The truck has been crashed and subsequently blown up, the microdot of sensitive information that Mr. Waverly had sent them after melted down to a single smear of unreadable ink, and the mission will be, once the bills have been cleared, rubber stamped a success.

Another one for the good guys.

It’s been two months since Italy, since Napoleon watched the smoke from Victoria’s ship blur the horizon. In those two months he and Peril have found themselves inching towards something strange and different, both fish out of water working for the new beast that is Waverly’s UNCLE. Not anything unfamiliar, though, at least not to Napoleon.

“Sure,” Napoleon says, elongating his vowels in a way he knows bothers Illya. “You’re right. Absolutely nothing to talk about. Except that now I know what the roof of your mouth feels like.” And then, because Napoleon has always known how to go for the jugular, and never known how not to, he says, “Is that how your mother taught you to deal with stressful situations?”

He expects the punch to the face, and isn’t disappointed. For a moment, L.A. has stars again.

*

After Italy was Istanbul. Istanbul turned into Brazil, and Brazil turned into Morocco. And then, eventually, Waverly had called them back to America. Somewhere during all that, but before the desperate and physical kiss in Los Angeles, Gaby, Kuryakin, and Solo had become a team. Not just a group of desperate spies thrown together, but three people who could rely upon each other, who knew one another’s weaknesses and strengths both.

It was the first time since childhood that Napoleon could look to his right and know not only who would be there, but that he or she would have his back. Not to stab him, but to protect him.

 _That_ was unfamiliar.

*

“Your assignment is a Mr. Bolodon.”

Mr. Waverly is seated behind the massive circular table that dominates the UNCLE headquarters’ briefing room in New York. He seems to take ridiculous pride in the table, and Napoleon is sure he fancies himself a King Arthur. Does that make him Lancelot? Or Mordred?

“I’m sorry. Mr. Bloated?”

Waverly sighs and stares at Napoleon, an exasperated look on his face that Napoleon himself is quite proud to be able to induce on command. He’s spent years training his superior officers, and this new UNCLE organization won’t be an exception. Mr. Waverly has yet to tug the leash, so to speak, but Napoleon keeps testing the length anyhow, waiting for that inevitable pull.

“Bolodon. Not bloated, to my knowledge anyway. Mr. _Bolodon_ is a man whose entire life purpose seems to be collecting beautiful things. After the war, he’s become one of the wealthiest men in the world, and has kept himself very strategically under the radar by living in countries that are less than one hundred percent accurate with their records.”

And that is a thing Napoleon is quite familiar with himself. It’s hard to be caught if no one knows what’s missing.

Waverly continues, “Anyhow, Mr. Bolodon has popped up on our watch list under suspicion of laundering money for a new organization we’re tagging as a threat, called THRUSH. You may remember Mrs. Vinciguerra’s undisclosed organization? Your mission will be to determine what of his liquid assets are, in fact, illegally gotten gains, and stop any flow of money to THRUSH at any cost.”

Napoleon slides his gaze to Illya, who is studiously staring at the map laid out on the center of the round table.

Gaby, to his left, hisses at him. When he looks over to her she rolls her eyes and mouths, “You. Me. Drinks. Later.”

It’s a good thing he can lip read in German.

“Children. Focus.” Mr. Waverly is, as expected, unimpressed.

“You did choose us, Alexander,” Napoleon says. “You knew who you hired.”

“It’s Mr. Waverly to you, Solo. And yes, unfortunately, I did. Now get out, your flight leaves tomorrow morning.”

*

Gaby can drink them all under the table. So Napoleon chooses a particularly hideous white wine she hates from past experience getting her drunk, and brings it to the hotel room she’s living in for the moment. UNCLE appears to have unlimited funds, and has offered each of them their own apartment, but none of them are ready for that. He’s not, anyhow. He hasn’t had a permanent address since he left home.

Gaby opens the door, takes the bottle from his hands, and says, “It’s warm.”

“Welcome to L.A. in the summer.”

“I am not drinking warm white wine, Napoleon.”

“Then I say we better go out.”

*

She takes him to a place she found full of germans. Some Jews that escaped, some not, but it’s a place where Gaby can say, “Two beers,” in her native tongue, and where Napoleon can watch her sink onto a bar stool and look comfortable for the first time in weeks. This is what he wanted; her to lead him somewhere, to be pulled into a world and, just for a night, not be in charge. She’s so good at that, taking him and Illya by the hand and kicking their feet from under them. That moment where she drops them to the floor feels like flying.

“So you want to tell me why Kuryakin turns pink when he looks at me now?” she says as soon as they get settled. The locals are staring at them, so they speak in English.  “He stammers now. He hasn’t stammered in a month. What did you do?”

Two sips in and Gaby, like him, goes for the jugular out of habit.

“You want the truth or--”

“What the fuck do you think?”

“Truth it is.” He takes a long pull off the beer Gaby has ordered for him. It’s German, which isn’t a surprise, and good, which isn’t a surprise either.

“I didn’t do anything. Our man Kuryakin has some surprises up his sleeve.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” she says into her own beer.

“He likes it rough.”

“Ah.” And then, a few seconds later. “I was wondering when that would happen.”

And that, to Napoleon, is a surprise. He says as much. “Were you? Because for me, that was a bit out of left field. Not that I minded, but now he’s decided never to look at me again, so that’s a bit of a problem for us, professionally and otherwise.”

She smiles, drains her beer, and orders shots. “Let’s get drunk. Kuryakin is a fool, and so are both of us, and I want to dance.”

Napoleon smiles. “Sounds like a plan to me.”

*

They get drunk. They don’t kiss. They do dance.

At the end of the night, when they’re stumbling back to Gaby’s hotel room, she leans into him and says, “So. Do you think he’ll do it again? Kiss you like he means it?”

Napoleon leans back into her until she stumbles and laughs. “Honestly? Probably not. Chances are higher that we’ll die next week, don’t you think? Just as a matter of principle.”

She sighs into his side. If she were as tall as Victoria was she’d be pressing her face into his neck, but their Gaby is a small girl, and Napoleon finds it endearing.

She’s not young, though, which she reminds him of when she says, “Probably, yes.”

She pats him on the bum and shuts the door on him. “Night Solo,” she says through the wood door, and he smiles.

*

They fly out to France in the morning. It’s a chartered flight, so the three of them, the flight attendant, and the pilot are the only ones hurtling through the sky together. Napoleon finds it oddly intimate.

Kuryakin is still not looking at him, and Gaby has her sunglasses on, nursing a mug of coffee in her hands. Her face turns to him, but he can’t tell whether or not she’s really looking at him or just staring out the window behind his head, until she hisses, “I’m going to the toilet and won’t be back for ten minutes. Deal with it.”

Kuryakin blinks owlishly at her retreating figure as she disappears into the closet-sized bathroom on the flight.

“Subtle, isn’t she?”

Kuryakin whips his head around to glare daggers at him.

“She would not need to be, if you would--”

“I’m sorry, were you saying something? I couldn’t hear over the sound of your cowardice.”

As predicted Illya’s hands begin to tremble, his rage bubbling to the surface to hide whatever else simmers below.

“What are you going to do, Peril? Kiss me?”

“No.” He spits the word out and clenches his fists together into balls. Napoleon imagines Illya and Gaby together. He always assumed they’d kept it up, their little will-they-won’t-they dance. He would have, if it had been him. But maybe not, if Ms. Teller’s lack of surprise at her ex-fake-fiance’s penchant for kissing men has anything to say about it.

“Interesting,” he says slowly.

It has the desired effect. The plane is starting its descent, and Gaby has been twiddling her thumbs in the restroom for nearly the promised time for them to sort themselves out, and after several harsh breaths, Kuryakin says, “What is so interesting, hm?”

“Oh nothing.” It’s too easy, really. Napoleon has been dancing with people his entire life, threading little lies into big ones, little lives into dead ones. He knows how to spin a tale, spin interest, and capture imagination. It’s how he’s survived, thrived, the burn and churn of a hot war in his formative years, and a cold one after. One little plant of an idea, then another, then a pearl necklace slipped off a delicate neck.

Only Illya Kuryakin’s neck is not so delicate.

Kuryakin catches him staring and that neck turns an appealing shade of pink.

“I know what you are doing,” he says after a beat of silence.

“Oh? What am I doing?”

Illya huffs and shifts in his seat, clearly uncomfortable. “I should strike you. It would be reasonable for me to do, in Russia. You keep this up, you will ruin everything.”

There is a pause where Napoleon tries to translate this into something he can grasp onto, and then Illya continues, voice very soft, very hesitant. “Solo, I do not want to lose everything.”

The restroom stall bangs open and Gaby walks back towards them, a cigaret in hand. She raises it to her lips and stares at them from atop her round sunglasses. She looks quite like she did in Italy, only without the shy lost-girl veneer. This, before them, is the woman who spent two years waiting for her moment in East Berlin and is done waiting.

“All sorted?” she asks as she takes a seat between them.

“Yes,” Kuryakin says, at the same time that Napoleon says, “No.”

*

France is beautiful. The war has left its marks on its countryside, but grass has grown up through the trenches and the bombed out gullies, and it is returning to what Napoleon imagines it was like before.

The corruption, though, hasn’t left. It is through bribes that they arrive on an airstrip south of Paris in the foothills of a picturesque town, and are motocar’d in via an UNCLE contact from there.

Mr. Waverly contacts them through a miniature device hidden in Gaby’s cigarette case, and they crowd around her to hear him over the wire.

“Ah, good, you made it. Oliver will take care of you; he has a cottage a half mile from Mr. Bolodon’s mansion. Try not to incur too much damage, please. Oliver is a friend.”

“Of course, sir,” Napoleon says.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Gaby says.

“We will be most careful,” Kuryakin says.  

Because of the time change, they don’t have the opportunity to do anything more than shift their clothes, discuss their plan and confirm their roles, and head out.

The plan is simple, the way things often start and rarely end. Gaby and Napoleon will drive to the Bolodon mansion as a couple of tourists, rich with new money and the insistence that can only be American, and secure themselves an invitation to dinner. Illya will case the house while the owner is occupied with Gaby’s entrancing beauty. Napoleon will slip away, they’ll grab any evidence they need from the safe, and they’ll scurry on home praising the host’s wonderful hospitality.

Gaby slides her sunglasses back onto her nose and pats down her hat-- Dior this time.

“We’ll be in and out by sundown,” she says. “Simple.”

*

It isn’t simple.

*

Oliver stops the car a mile out, at the end of the long driveway to the Bolodon mansion. Peril gets out, and Oliver puts down the top of the convertible so that Gaby and Napoleon, in the back seat, settle into their role.

In the French afternoon sunlight Gaby is utterly dazzling. She’s in a gown that cuts straight down her back, leaving the curve of her spine an elegant line. Forty thousand dollars of diamonds-- on loan from somewhere, with Waverly’s strict requirement that they return accounted for-- sparkle from her neck and her ears drip with gold.

She looks a goddess.

Napoleon doesn’t look half bad himself; his suit is high quality navy wool, bespoke, and his shoes are handmade leather. Together the two of them look like they’re worth a few million dollars. Which is exactly the point.

Kuryakin clears his throat from beside the car. He’s still flushed red, and clearly not from the heat of the day.

“I’ll just...”

Napoleon smiles at him, gently. “Go on. I’ll see you inside. And Peril?”

He’d already started to turn, and so he twists back to look at the two of them.

“Don’t get caught.”

“Hm,” he says. And with that, he’s slithering into the bushes, a sleek muscular giant of a man clad in black, fading impossibly into the shadows of the mid-day sun.

“Ready?” Oliver asks them. Whoever Mr. Waverly’s man Oliver is, he’s a steady man with a face made of stone.

“Drop us off at the mansion,” Napoleon says, and tucks his hand into Gaby’s.

*

Mr. Bolodon doesn’t answer the door himself. A butler does that for him, and shows Napoleon and Gaby into the foyer and hops off to fetch two glasses of water for them and a series of questions. No, of course they haven’t a car, they don’t _drive themselves_. Their driver dropped them off, and went about to do some errands. They aren’t lost, they’re here to see Mr. Bolodon’s collection and to meet the man himself. Why on earth else would they come all the way up here?

It’s only after Napoleon mentions several acquaintances he shares with Mr. Bolodon-- all gleaned from the dossier prepared on him-- and Gaby remarks how much she’d just adore to meet a man with such a wonderful collection of art, such fine taste, that Bolodon himself makes an appearance.  

He is a short man, with light blond hair fading to gray, wearing a gray suit with buttons undone, lending him a casual air unfair for a man dressed in a suit that costs as much as a house. He is announced just as he descends the main staircase, which is both ostentatious in design, and ostentatious in his use. Gaby sighs, just once, and gets to work.

“Mr. Bolodon, I’m so charmed to meet you. Your collection is the talk of all the circles we run in, isn’t it dear?”

“Absolutely, darling.”

And so Holly and Peter Johnsen-- “John-sen, not ‘son’, you wouldn’t believe how many people get that wrong”-- are led around the mansion’s main level through room after room of gold and glitz. The majority of the collection is paintings in frames of what are, to Napoleon’s critical eye, solid gold. There are cases and cases of coins, necklaces, artifacts from places of old, and tapestries on every wall.

It’s a museum, and-- also to Napoleon’s discerning eye-- fortified like one.

But Gaby is off, working Bolodon like the professional he is, keeping his attention with gentle flirting, working him to giving them a layout of the mansion, an idea of the security (present, but not well organized) and a run-down of the worth of the place.

She’s gotten to be very good. Napoleon lets her take the lead, and so does Bolodon, dazzled half by her personality and half by the stones glittering around her breasts. She leads him, rather than the reverse, through his home, and he answers her every question.

Napoleon sees his moment and says, “Say, do you have a little boy’s room I can use? I’m sure my wife can keep you company while I make use of it.”

“Of course, of course, Henry can show you the way.” Bolodon says, dismissively. He doesn’t even look at Napoleon, instead captivated by Gaby.

Perfect.

Henry the butler shows Napoleon to a restroom on the main level near the front entrance, no doubt intended exclusively for guests, and, as expected, wanders off to do the rest of his duties. Napoleon, once he’s sure the coast is clear, begins to case the mansion in full.

He pockets a gold chain on his way to the vault in the basement. He’s only human after all, and Bolodon is hardly the sort of man who deserves to keep his ill gotten gains.

The vault, located directly below the grand staircase on the main level, is accessible by a short and drab servants staircase to the rear. It is not as impressive as the one Victoria employed to protect her nuclear operation in Italy, but it’s still a very professional installation and located in a part of the house that would have required one of Victoria’s nukes to get to if one were less skilled at subterfuge.

It is unsurprising to find his Russian partner standing with his back to the staircase, staring at the vault’s design, his face dark with thought. Illya, for all his stiff back and shoulders the size of the Berlin wall would say otherwise, is able to sneak in and out of just about anywhere. He doesn’t bother asking how the man got in.

“Fancy meeting you here,” Napoleon says as he steps a light foot onto the cement floor of the basement.

Kuryakin turns around with a frown on his face. But he doesn’t ask about the idiom, and Napoleon doesn’t elaborate.

“I have not seen this type of vault before.” Always one to get straight to it, his Russian friend. Except for when he doesn’t, of course.

Napoleon stares at the vault, taking in its hinges, its lock, the type of steel that makes up its face. It’s shining and polished, almost a display piece in and of itself. He feels as if he’s back in Italy. Only now the two of them know each other, and he’s more interested in cracking Illya than Bolodon’s secrets.

“Neither have I.”

“Damn, we--”

“Now, now, Peril. That doesn’t mean I can’t break into it. It’s a custom job, a bit of a Frankenstein, but I know its parts.” Or, most of them anyhow. “I can get us in there.”

“You’re sure?”

“Absolutely.”

There is a file somewhere, Napoleon is sure, of his childhood. He’s done his best to destroy what evidence of it he can-- by eradicating his own midwestern accent, and lighting on fire records when he’s given access. But files float, and he can only track down so much. He is quite sure, somewhere, there is a comment from his very first commanding officer when he enlisted. It says, “Overconfident, brash, foolish. Prone to lying.”

It is not wholly inaccurate.

The vault is a combination of six different models, borrowing strengths and weaknesses from each. After all, what thief could possibly be prepared for something that was unique. Mr. Bolodon, he’s sure, was sold on its impenetrability.

Napoleon Solo is not.

He unspools his tools from the secreted compartments in his suit and begins to work. It takes him twice as long as he’d like, but with one ear perched to the stethoscope pressed against the cold metal, he finally gets them in. The whole time he can feel Illya’s eyes on the back of his neck, on his hands as they skirt the dial with a deft and careful touch.

“After you,” Napoleon says with a tip of an invisible hat as he swings the door of the vault open with a dash of gallantry.

Kuryakin glares at him but strides into the darkness ahead of them without pause. Good man.

The vault is surprisingly small. This is the first thing Napoleon notices after they both enter. The second is that it is empty. The walls are not lined with gold ingots, and there are no stacks of paper bills or crates of jewels. The vault doesn’t have its own lighting system, so it takes his eyes a moment to adjust to the dim cave-like interior of the place, lit now only from the light filtering in from the hallway of the basement.

“Peril, I have the damndest feeling about this,” he says as he looks around at the emptiness around them.

Kuryakin is in front of him, running a hand along the back wall, when the vault door behind them swings shut. It latches with a metal-on-metal clang that echoes in the darkness.

And suddenly, they are trapped.

Even without light, Napoleon knows where Kuryakin is. It’s become a sixth sense of his, to know where his partners are at all times. He can almost taste the man’s presence two feet in front of him, can sense him turning around to stare in his general direction like the hound he is.

“Ah,” Napoleon says in the dark. “That would be that feeling, then.”

“Quiet,” Kuryakin hisses, and Napoleon listens to two quick footsteps as the man crosses the length of the vault, no doubt working on spatial memory of its size and dimensions, to listen at the door for external interference.

And therein lies the immediate question: have they been locked in by poor luck, or by malice. Either are eminently possible, and Napoleon quiets even his breathing to let Peril listen at the steel holding them hostage.

Two long minutes pass before he hears the rustle of Kuryakin straightening. “There is no one there.”

He says it with enough confidence that Napoleon would have believed him, even months prior in the blush of their partnership. Now he takes it as fact.

“I’m afraid that still leaves us in quite a pickle.”

The sound of Kuryakin’s short, frustrated inhalation is delicious. “Your American phrases are inane.”

No one gloating at the door means both good and bad things for the two of them. It is unlikely that Bolodon has sealed them in with intent. But it is also unlikely that anyone will come rescue them. Gaby will not know that things have gone wrong for some time, and even if she does, disengaging herself from the oily owner of this place will be hard to do without his attracting his attention. Bolodon himself is likely too distracted to notice the inconvenient husband of the diamond draped beauty is missing in action, but that will only last so long, and without a ready excuse, Gaby herself will be in trouble.

These thoughts run through his mind in a steady stream, one after the other, followed by a quick estimation of the amount of breathable air in a room of this size.

Math was never his strength, but vaults are, and he doesn’t like the answer his mind gins up.

It leaves them with little to do but think.

“So,” Napoleon says after they have breathed the stale air for a minute in silence. “I don’t suppose--”

“Do not speak about it.”

Napoleon smiles, content that Illya won’t be able to see it in the dark. The other man wastes no time pacing, audibly walking the boundaries of the vault to gauge its size and dimensions. To determine, if Napoleon is being maudlin, the size and dimensions of their coffin.

“How do you know what I was going to say, hm? I might have been asking about carbon monoxide conversion timing.”

“I know because I know,” comes the still-crisp voice. Their coffin is quite small. Napoleon, simply from listening to Kuryakin walk its bounds, estimates it’s five feet by seven, deeper than it is long. Small for two men to be trapped within, but perfectly capable of holding vast quantities of treasure.

It’s a very big vault to be sitting completely empty. Locked.

In the course of his life, Napoleon has broken into dozens and dozens of vaults, safes, secret rooms, and treasure troves. Some for profit, some for fun, and some for the army and the CIA. He’s been led into others with foolish open arms.

They’ve never been empty. Even if someone has gotten to the haul before him, there are crates, shelves, evidence of loss or wanton destruction.

“Illya, this vault is a fake.”

To his credit, and to Napoleon’s relief, Illya does not waste air asking how he could know, how it could be true, how he hadn’t noticed until now. Instead he closes the distance between them until Napoleon can feel his breath against his face and says, “So there must be a true vault elsewhere.”

There are moments like these where a small part of Napoleon’s mind, a part he thought long since atrophied, sliced off in the war or even before, says very quietly, _I love this man._

“Indeed. Start looking over there, I’ll look over here. And, Illya, about the other day...”

“No. Not worth the breath, Cowboy.”

Unlike the darkness of night, there is no small light for his eyes to adjust to, no starlight or far-away headlights. No flashlights bobbing behind them or searchlights forcing them to dive for cover. Here there is pure darkness of a sort that is disappearing from the world. Napoleon hates it. It can all disappear, for all he cares.

He runs a hand across the cinderblocks, searching for loose mortar, for a secret lever, for anything, really. He’s systematic about it, just like he’s sure Illya is; going over their would-be-tomb inch by inch.

There is nothing.

He longs for the ring that Gaby still wears (“because I like it,” she says defiantly when he quirks an eyebrow at it). He knows Illya tracks both of them in different ways; Gaby through her ring, and Napoleon through his shoes (much like Gaby, he has not removed the tracker, either, and all three of them pretend with differing levels of success that there is no reason for that). And Napoleon has his little tricks, too.

But Gaby...

His fingers begin to retrace their steps. There is nothing, and eventually he brushes against Kuryakin’s shoulder.

He’s warm, alive, and trembling.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” he says to the quiet and to Kuryakin both. “A man like Bolodon wouldn’t have a safe with nothing in it. It just doesn’t make sense. There _has_ to be another layer. _Something_.”

Kuryakin is quiet, and Napoleon leaves his hand on the man’s arm. It’s a silly childhood fear, but he worries that if he lets go, he’ll never find him again. The darkness is oppressive.

Suddenly and without warning he misses the open skies of the Minnesota summer, laying out on a quilt in the yard of his aunt’s farm when it was too hot to sleep indoors. Even when it was overcast, there was the blurred blush of the moon, or the green-yellow display of fireflies in the grasses around the house.

Equally without warning, he finds himself saying, “The first time I saw dark like this was in the war.”

Illya nods, and the motion is radiated down through his arm and into Napoleon. “It was the same for me. I spent two months in a submarine.”

“That wasn’t in your file.”

Kuryakin huffs. “And you are not the age your file says you are.”

No, indeed, there is that. “For me it was the bombed out cities, hiding in caves for weeks.”

“How old were you?”

“Old enough.”

They’re quiet for a bit, when, finally, Illya moves closer to him. Now their arms brush, length to length. If Napoleon were to turn just a few inches, they would be facing one another, chest to chest.

So he does.

“Tell me,” he says, low and throaty, “why not, hm? Haven’t we both paid our dues enough? Can’t we have this, too?”

He can feel the warmth of Illya’s body against his, and leans forward until, finally, their skin touches. Napoleon’s lips find Illya’s neck, and he presses a gentle kiss there. Asking.

Illya shudders under him. “I don’t want to lose this. If I go back to Russia, I will go to gulag for this. For me this is not dalliance, it is permanent.”

“We could die in a few hours. Or next week. Or a month from now. Dalliance is all we have.”

And, two breaths later, Illya leans in, hesitates, and pushes Napoleon roughly to the wall.

His back hits the blocks and he relishes the feeling of pressure against his chest. Of _Illya_ against his chest. There is nothing nice, nothing tentative about it. Illya, just like in life, is a force of nature, of bridled anger and frustration and passion, and he bites Napoleon’s collarbone hard enough to leave a mark.

And Napoleon, breathless, loses himself in the dark.

Between one kiss and the next, he missteps and his foot catches against something on the floor. He sinks exactly two inches on his left side.

In an instant the crushing blackness and Illya’s weight both disappear and blinding light replaces them.

“I’ll be damned,” he says, before his eyes adjust fully and the world is just spots of white and yellow and gray. “Wouldn’t have put money on a floor switch. Those went out of favor years ago.”

“Thought you were supposed to be expert thief.”

“I _am_ an expert thief. Mr. Bolodon is just--”

A throat clears. It is neither Napoleon’s throat nor Illya’s. “Mr. Bolodon,” says Mr. Bolodon from inside his true vault, surrounded by glittering treasures, stacks of gold ingots, and the bright, dazzling sight of light bouncing off diamonds, “knows how to catch expert thieves.”

Napoleon blinks away the blinding light. The empty vault they are in is a spiderweb, and they have been expertly snagged.

But is Bolodon the spider, or a fellow fly? Waverly and his team of intelligence gatherers presumed the former, no doubt due to his position in France during the war. One does not become the holder of riches beyond measure while also holding scruples.

Napoleon’s vision clears from the shock of light, and he sees enough to make out not just an expanse of sparkling valuables, but the specifics of what live in the Bolodon’s true vault. The things he does not put on display in his museum-like house.

Before he begins to speak, Napoleon feels the shape of the thing take form in his mind. The things here are just as beautiful, just as valuable, just as stunning if not more so to what is upstairs. But there is a stark difference in their provenance.

And he smiles wide and steps forward into the light, content with Illya at his back and Gaby, perched on Bolodon’s arm and still and quiet as a deer, in front of him.

“Yes,” he says, voice steady with confidence and delight. “We were trying to rob you.”

Behind him he hears Kuryakin hiss, but he ignores him and instead pushes forward further into the space, closer to both the contents of the vault and to their supposed host. “After all,” he continues, “isn’t that exactly what you did? Come now, Mr. Bolodon, you and I both know where that painting came from.”

He points to a Rembrandt.

“And that gold, too. In fact, I’d bet not a single thing here was from your own sweat and tears. No, this is all from the blood of others. I would know, I’m guilty of my share of looting, too. It was so easy, when the war first ended. But the war is long over, now. And the world is different.”

Gaby is still in front of him, a statue except for her breathing, and even that seems muted somehow. She is letting him lead, just like Illya is. So Napoleon pushes onwards.

“And you know it, don’t you? So let us make this easier, hm? We can take it all off your hands. The blood washed away. No more need for false vaults and questionable characters.”

And the shape of it in his mind comes to its full features, and Napoleon, surrounded by beautiful things and beautiful people, and the taint of death, smiles.

Mr. Bolodon is quiet and still, too, until he finally slips Gaby’s hand off his arm and pats it gently.

“You have a great deal of nerve. A great deal. But you aren’t incorrect. These things came to me in ways I would prefer they had not. We all of us here in France had to do things in the war we would prefer to forget, in order to stay when the Germans came. And now I am being approached by unscrupulous people left and right, begging for my riches, begging for the gold that I hid away for nazis. I pretend it is not here, but I cannot hide it from them forever. As you have seen. ”

“We work for UNCLE,” Napoleon says, when Bolodon’s speech dwindles to an end and he seems to be at a loss for words.

“I haven’t heard of it.”

“Let us put that blood money to good use and you might.”

And Bolodon nods.

*

Mr. Waverly’s man Oliver picks them up in the car an hour later and they pack the gold away in hat boxes and suitcases, and Napoleon silently says goodbye to the Rembrandt they leave behind. It was Bolodon’s only condition, that UNCLE’s resources be put to use finding the rightful owner of the art. The gold there is no hope of repatriating-- it came from the teeth and wedding bands and jewels of a hundred thousand owners, and they all agree with Mr. Waverly’s assessment that it should be used by UNCLE to stop future wars.

Mr. Waverly’s voice is tinny over the cigarette case wireless. “Good work,” he says with his usual light air. “I’ll have a plane waiting for you at the airport.”

Oliver lets them nap in the car and then deposits them unceremoniously at the airport. The life of the spy is not as glamorous as the young Napoleon, laying out under the summer sky in the farmland, had imagined.

Gaby has once again secreted herself to the restroom on the chartered flight, and he and Illya are alone, as much as either of them ever are.

“So...” he drawls. There are a few inches of space between them, and Napoleon is reminded of the vault, when they were pressed up against one another, desperate.

Illya takes a breath, lets it out, and then leans over to put his mouth over Napoleon’s.

“Shut up,” he says against his lips, teeth clicking against teeth. “You talk too much.”

*

Five minutes later, Gaby exits with a delighted smile on her face.

“All sorted?” She asks.

“Yes,” they say at the same time.

 

_Fin_


End file.
